effeminate son, and England probably suffered not a little from those passionate outbursts of indignation which destroyed all confidence between father and son, and hence all influence for good on the character of the latter.

I have endeavoured to point to some leading aspects of the character of Edward the First, but his mind was so many-sided that I cannot hope to have fully expressed the Man, although I may have given some idea of the King. He has been frequently called the English Justinian, and he certainly combined in himself the presence and strong will of an Emperor with the instincts and genius of a Legislative Founder.

120

EDWARD THE SECOND.

ONCE more the greatness of the House of Plantagenet, which had grown to such dimensions under the first Edward, was destined to dwindle, if not to the proportions of the third Henry, at least to those of decided mediocrity. Edward of Caernarvon, as he was distinctively called, was not an essentially feeble character, but a feeble and bad copy of a higher type of mind. The handsome face, not unpleasing in itself, but made unattractive by its unmeaning and almost vacant expression, was the index of a character in which considerable abilities, strong feelings, and refining tastes were neutralised or distorted into gross defects, by the absence not only of all high motive, but of all significant purpose. There must have been from the first some essential ingredient wanting in the composition of Edward, but there can be no doubt that the natural deficiency was aggravated by the circumstances of his early life. Great men and strong men are not, as a rule, the most happy in the management of their children. Either they have too decided theories, or they have

too limited sympathies, to accommodate themselves to the demands and shortcomings of domestic life. They either cannot tolerate the insubordination of their own flesh and blood to their own peculiar ideas, or presume on the existence in their offspring of instincts of greatness and thoughtfulness, the former of which are rare in young or old, and the latter of which are incompatible with the characteristics of all but a very exceptional childhood. Edward the First, though a stern man from the gravity of his character, was not an unkindly man in his personal relations; and his conduct towards his son, in early years, however injudicious, was not such as to challenge criticism on the ground of undue severity. Young Edward was left without the care of a mother at a very early age, and although he seems to have suffered less in some respects from that loss than many do, in consequence of the kindly and sympathising treatment he experienced from his stepmother, there can be little doubt that in the death of Eleanor of Castile he lost that delicate and discriminating goodsense and that elevated tone which no mere sympathy and affection can replace. His father, too, in the yearning agony of his own deeply felt loss, seems to have sought relief in surrounding the orphan child with every luxury and indulgence that his own stately ideas of the royal position could suggest. He made the young prince the centre of a little Court, as brilliant in its exterior as he vainly

believed it was elevating in its internal influences. He wished his son to feel like a king, so he brought him up in a life of kingly magnificence. The character of young Edward was eminently one to deceive a prepossessed spectator, such as a father naturally is, as to his real bent and capacity. As I have said, he was an imperfect imitation of something much greater and better; and any such indications of character, however slight and transient, would arrest the attention and be exaggerated in the mind of a paternal theorist. He would recognise in his son the symptoms of many of his own early feelings, before experience had strengthened and modified them; and remembering how his own self-reliant character had ripened and expanded under the most unfavourable circumstances, he might well believe that a character which seemed to indicate such points of similarity would similarly grow up to perfection under more auspicious influences. Perhaps he was not unconscious of the too great tension, not to say hardness, of his own mind, and attributing this to the severity of the school of discipline to which he had been subjected, sought to soften its tone in his young son. His plan seems to have been to place around young Edward those who would control but sympathise with his tastes, to maintain a watchful eye over the general expenditure of the household, but leave everything else to the operation of natural character. The result was that the Prince, surrounded

by pliant flatterers, who were afraid probably to mortify the King by telling him the real character of his son, lost all idea of self-discipline, and allowed his mind to fall into a perfect chaos of imperfect sympathies, unfulfilled plans, inordinate fancies, and wilful irresolution and vacillation. When this character at last displayed itself in its true colours to the undeceived father, the result was a violent reaction from blind confidence to extreme reprobation, to which disappointment and wounded pride gave additional bitterness. The insolent insouciance with which young Edward paraded his vices before his father's eyes, as well as the public, and the cool effrontery with which he preferred his most unpalatable requests to the King himself, stung the latter into a frenzy of rage, and destroyed all chance of a mutual understanding. His favourite tastes were music and horses, but no taste and no object seemed to have a paramount or abiding hold on his mind. He was always changing his plans and his wishes, and the only thing in which he appeared to exhibit any constancy was in his attachment to persons. On those to whom he once took a fancy it seemed as if his wandering mind concentrated itself with a fixed intensity in proportion to his general levity. Nothing was too great a favour to be bestowed on them, and the idea of any limits or proportions to his favouritism seems to have been. wholly wanting. It appeared as if the penury of